No Tour de France for Freire in 2011

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Oscar Freire will not ride the Tour de France this year, a race he calls the “most boring” one of the year. The Rabobank rider has won four Tour stages in his career, as well as the green jersey in 2008 but is likely to focus on the Vuelta as Rabobank build their Tour de France team around overall contender Robert Gesink.

It was “a decision taken by the team, they want to put everything on Robert Gesink,“ he told nu.nl. “I understand that the team concentrates on the general classification, other teams do that too.

"The Tour is the most boring race of the year,” he continued. “In the flat stages you have an escape and then a sprint. In the mountain stages it is always the same riders.”

He compared that to the Tour of Flanders, which he called “is a real race" and suggested a radical change to the cycling calendar.

"It would benefit the sport to ride the Classics in the summer. The Tour gets a lot of attention because there's no other sports really happening in the summer.”